The draw of the original NWN version of this mod was never, for me, in the game play. NWN game play was just something you had to endure to experience the story and the characters (NWN was not designed t take place in a city with narrow streets like ADWR realistically has - you can't see the character you control for a good portion of the time outdoors just because the buildings block your view). Remember how combat was like watching a re-enactment of the Battle of Verdun? When the PC entered combat, the player could go off and watch three or four six-minute Monte Python skits while waiting for the fight to be resolved.
I expect this version to have lost far more NWN noise than ADWR signal.
I've played NWN (and various modules) many, many times. While it doesn't have the most intuitive camera controls, it works rather well once you get used to it and I've never had issues.
What first drew me into the module is that for the first time you were not supposed to be able to fight out of every situation. You were a rogue, and getting noticed meant serious trouble.
You could argue that Aurora engine wasn't really built for sneaking around, a statement I wouldn't disagree much with, but ADWR did an excellent job with it, given the constraints.
How will author represent patrol movement pattern in HTML? Light sources? Sight range? Lines of sight? Simply navigating the giant city of Betancuria in HTML is going to be a chore. What about when it comes to combat and resting?
I don't see it working well.
When it comes to rape scene in the beginning, I feel it should have been left in. It serves two very important functions:
1) it hammers home the point that the princess is effectively no longer a princess, but a very vulnerable girl who will get taken advantage of and who can get killed easily, without anyone shedding a tear. In fact, it would be just one of the traumas she would have to deal with. It serves to hammer home the point that she is no longer royalty, that she has hit the bottom, she's now lowest of the low, all alone in a very dangerous world. The rest of the game was about her rising again, albeit in a different way.
2) it sets at the very beginning that princess isn't a virgin (which she would have been as a princess otherwise) and sorts out the potentially massive amount of dialogue variations that would otherwise have to be written.
Considering that this is an even darker variant of the middle ages, you have to assume rapes and other types of violence happen, quite often, and people deal with it.
One could argue that the princess would have been effectively raped on her wedding night, meaning that in all likelyhood she would have been married off to someone she had never seen before who would have forced himself on her on their wedding night, whether she was ready or not.
Most importantly, I don't see any role playing problems. You're not forced to role play the princess to actively seek out sexual encounters. All other sexual encounters in the game were avoidable, so you could role play the princess to your heart's content. She could be a frigid ice queen, or she could be complete slut and anything in between.
